The Priest

by Gerard O'Donovan

  ‘Everybody has friends, Siobhan. Even rapists and murderers get good character references in court.’

  ‘Yeah, well I got an email from a psychologist contact of mine earlier tonight. And do you know what, she said every one of these attacks had hallmarks of something called an “anger-retaliatory” personality type. She said the levels of brutality indicated displaced aggression, someone harbouring feelings of “cumulative, uncontrollable rage”. Not necessarily related to the act itself, since the root of it, she said, could be anything. Maybe a severe trauma in childhood, or whatever. But the trigger and focus of the aggression would nearly always be the same. And the thing is, most people I spoke to who actually know Emmet Byrne seemed to think he was sound. A bit on the slow side but always nice, always cheerful. Definitely not your stewing-away-till-he-bursts type, anyway.’

  Mulcahy hardly heard most of it. He was still stuck on ‘anger-retaliatory’. He realised suddenly what had been nagging at him since he’d been out in Palmerston Park. Jesica Salazar’s whispered ‘Como un cura’. Rinn’s erect posture, the superior manner, the dressing like an old man. Like a sexless man. Rinn was exactly like one or two priests he’d known as a boy. So held back, so constrained, so packed with repression and anger they all but stank of it. That’s what had been crackling off him when Mulcahy was looking at the pictures on the wall. Anger, not anxiety.

  He looked up and saw Siobhan was staring at him, just like the barman had in the Long Hall. Like he was off his nut.

  ‘Are you alright, Mulcahy?’

  ‘Sure, yeah… sorry,’ he said, trying to regroup his thoughts. ‘I was just thinking, y’know, the guys on the murder team probably know all that stuff, too. I mean, Brogan’s done all the courses, she knows all the psychology.’

  ‘But she’s not in charge any more, is she? And they’re always up for a quick result. It wouldn’t be the first time you guys let enthusiasm get the better of you.’

  He didn’t even feel the dig. He was too busy with what was evolving inside his own head. Rinn was occupying most of the space in there now, and behind him, barely visible in the gloom, those photos of his grandfather and that glorious sunlit painting, the one he had been so defensive about: Gweedore Summer.

  ‘What’re you so distracted about, anyway, all of a sudden?’ The darkness dissolved as he felt the prickle of Siobhan’s piercing blue gaze search his face.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said, shutting it down.

  ‘Yeah, sure. You’re a hopeless liar, Mulcahy. Come on, I was right just then, wasn’t I? You are thinking about another suspect, aren’t you? You must’ve had others. Is it someone who fits the bill better? Are you thinking of someone in particular?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, I—’

  ‘Jesus, you are, aren’t you?’ she interrupted excitedly. ‘I can tell. Look, c’mon, I can help. We have resources at the paper. You don’t even have to give me the whole story now. Just let me in first when you’ve got it.’

  And there it was, and he hadn’t even had to ask for it, his chance to look into the past.

  ‘Okay, then,’ he said, ‘maybe there is something you can help me with.’

  Brogan pulled the door of the observation room shut behind her, leaned back against the corridor wall and breathed in a lungful of heartfelt satisfaction. Despite being deep in the bowels of Kilmainham Garda Station, the air tasted remarkably cool and fresh. That, though, could have been because she’d just spent the last hour and a half in close, hot, sweaty proximity to five other detectives, all big men, in that tiny room, watching something she’d never seen before. At least, not to that degree of intensity.

  She rubbed the back of her neck, hardly knowing whether it was excitement or exhaustion she was feeling more keenly. Although her back was creaking and her arms and legs felt like sacks, the blood was still rushing through her veins like an express train. She actually felt more alive than she had at any time since her boy was born. Eighteen hours on the trot already, with almost no sleep the night before. But what a day it had been.

  Only an hour or so after she and the others had arrived and settled in at Kilmainham with Lonergan’s murder mob, rumours had started trickling in of a breakthrough in the case. Then, just before noon, Lonergan had come in, absolutely buzzing. She’d liked him when she’d first met him, earlier, at the scene in the Phoenix Park – a big, easy guy, six-foot-three at least, early forties but fit with it and smart green eyes that somehow never seemed to land in the wrong place. She’d liked him even more, then, when the first thing he did was invite her into his office for a one-on-one briefing in which he outlined the rapid progress the investigation had made over the course of the morning. So unlike Healy. So unlike any other superintendent she’d met. There was real respect in everything he said to her and, weirdly, she’d felt this mad kind of warmth bubbling up in her towards him, like instant loyalty.

  It had all been a bit of a blur since then: the massive break about the order code on the plastic sheeting, the raid on Emmet Byrne’s place and the discovery of the fibre bark-bags in the van, the briefing Lonergan had asked her to ‘co-host’ for the sixty-strong murder team, and the press call with Commissioner Garvey announcing Byrne’s arrest. Jesus, as if the day hadn’t had enough in it already.

  Then, to cap it all, she’d just watched Lonergan interview Emmet Byrne and reel him in like an absolute master. The man had been beyond brilliant. Lonergan and a grim-looking detective sergeant doing a classic double-hander, but with himself very much taking the lead. Never aggressive but always keeping the pressure up on Byrne to the max, the line of questioning relentlessly clear and focused, yet stepping back whenever the suspect got in any way confused or befuddled, which was often. Lonergan, she’d noticed, always gave Byrne the space and time to get his story exactly the way he wanted it, and only then came back in hard to smash it to pieces.

  It had been such a thrill to watch. All of them in the room next door glued to the interview through the mirrored glass, breathless at times as Lonergan coaxed yet another small but crucial admission out of Byrne, never really going at him direct but constantly chipping away, helping the man drag himself deeper and deeper into a maze of self-incrimination. In the end, ninety minutes was all it had taken him to reduce Byrne to blubbering remorse – and a confession to all three attacks. ‘Yes, yes, okay, I done it. I burned them. I made them bleed. All of them, may the Lord forgive me. I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ Byrne had wept at the climax.

  It would be a long time before she forgot that moment, how all of them in that room had let out a whoop of delight and punched the air when Lonergan looked over into the mirror and winked at them through the glass. He’d nailed the big admission. Over the next few days they could work on Byrne for the detail, but for now they had enough to charge him with, whenever they wanted to.

  Christ, but that man was an inspiration.

  Brogan looked at her watch: ten-fifteen p.m. already. She felt in her pocket for her mobile. Even the thought of calling home and listening to her husband, Aidan, griping about her long absence couldn’t bring her down. Aidan could go fuck himself, she thought. How dare he say she didn’t spend enough time with the boy. Aidan was the one who’d said he was happy to stay at home. Well, it was up to him, not her, to make that work. And as for the boy, she’d always found the time, and always would find it, no matter how hard she worked.

  She stepped away from the wall as the door beside her opened and two of the lads she’d shared the room with for the last couple of hours – Lonergan’s lads – came out, laughing together, and bade her a friendly goodnight. She looked at their broad backs as they walked down the corridor, the clatter of their footsteps echoing against the old tile walls, and she knew something for certain. It’d been a long time since she’d found somewhere she wanted to be this much. Now she had, she was going to doing everything in her power to keep things that way. Somehow, she was going to get herself transferred onto Lonergan’s team permanently.

  He’d b
een at it for well over an hour, sitting at the Herald’s long newsdesk, a couple of fluorescent ceiling lights illuminating their small patch of floor space, everywhere else in darkness or bathed in the orange glow drifting in through the windows from the streetlights outside. For a man who’d never been inside a newspaper office before, Mulcahy found it all a bit of a let-down. Ranks of desks and computer screens sectioned off into individual fiefdoms, like any office anywhere. The only difference he could see was that there were a hell of a lot of TVs around, on shelves, on walls, on stands; you wouldn’t be able to hear yourself think if they were all on at the same time. And Siobhan, of course, clacking away at her keyboard behind him.

  All he’d asked her was if he could look up the Herald’s news archive sometime. And she’d been all over it right away, saying, ‘Yeah, come on, come over and we’ll look it up now.’ He could see why she was good at her job – she wouldn’t take no for an answer. She’d dragged him back to the Herald, sat him down and showed him how to look material up on the system. She had explained to him about the various online cuttings services they used for other publications. And he had tried… but there was no magic bullet. The in-house archive had only been computerised as far back as the mid-nineties. Even then, all he got was floods of random stuff that meant nothing to him. He did his best to winkle out some information about Rinn, his grandfather or the big mystery in Gweedore. And once or twice he thought he’d found something, but they were just wisps – hints that something bad had happened – that dissolved as soon as he tried to pin them down.

  In the end he was just plain knackered, his eyes watering more and more with every new search he called up. Until he suddenly caught the flicker of a TV screen blooming into life beside him. He looked round. Siobhan was standing behind his chair, a remote in her hand.

  ‘I just wanted to catch the late news,’ she said.

  ‘Sure.’ Mulcahy turned to watch as the headlines ran out and Siobhan raised the volume. No surprise, the lead item was the Priest arrest, and he leaned forward as he saw Brogan onscreen, briefly, at the centre of a swirling crowd, with a tall guy he recognised from the press conference, Lonergan presumably, leading this other guy out, with a coat over his head, through the car park at Kilmainham Garda Station. It was a real scrum, with cameras flashing and all the press monkeys pushing in and jostling to get near. Then someone caught hold of the coat this guy had covering him and pulled it away, and the suspect’s face was exposed for a few seconds and he looked absolutely shitscared. But it wasn’t the expression of fear that made Mulcahy sit up and gawp, but the face it was on. He was sure he’d seen the man before, very recently, but it wouldn’t come.

  Then Siobhan pushed the volume up another notch and he heard the newsreader saying: ‘The suspect who’s reported to run a gardening business in Chapelizod was arrested just after noon today when Gardai from the Murder Squad raided his flat in St Imelda’s Road…’ Mulcahy felt the breath go out of him from the shock. The gardener! He saw the face again now, but in his mind’s eye, with a baseball cap on, anger in his eyes and a hammer in his hand. It was him, the fucking gardener from Rinn’s place, the one who’d been working there that day he’d gone round. He’d seen him, met him, even been bloody threatened by him. And the van, for Christ’s sake. The fucking van sitting there outside the house and he’d walked straight past it.

  Mulcahy felt sick to his stomach, had to put a hand to his chest to stop himself being wiped out by the thought of it. He desperately needed to think straight. That wasn’t while Paula Halpin was missing, was it? No, he reassured himself, he’d only gone over to Palmerston Park after her body had been found, and he felt a tiny trickle of relief at that. But then the anger came again. Any money, he’d bet any bloody money that, if they checked the dates back, they’d find that Byrne was working at Rinn’s the day Caroline Coyle was attacked, too. And, as for poor Paula Halpin, walking up from Dartry, it wasn’t Rinn’s clutches she’d fallen into, it was his bloody gardener’s. Christ, how could he have come so close yet got it so totally, hopelessly wrong?

  For a moment or two he felt totally emptied out by the thought, as good as paralysed from head to toe by the shock of it. He glanced over at Siobhan but thankfully she didn’t seem to have noticed his reaction, absorbed as she was in the news report. He sat back in the chair, thinking about Byrne, thinking about Rinn, feeling it all go round and round again. He rubbed his forehead, his head began to pound again – and his lungs jumped on the bandwagon, screaming for a cigarette. He stood up slowly, stretching his arms, pretending a calmness he was utterly devoid of, as Siobhan turned to him.

  ‘I’ve had enough of this for one night, Siobhan. I’m knackered and getting nowhere. Sorry to waste your time, but I’ve got to get out of here now, before my head explodes.’

  He’d been really very sweet down at the main door, insisting that she contact Brogan first thing about the package, fretting over the fact that she was going back into the office on her own. He’d even come over a little shy when she asked: ‘So are we friends again, now?’ But he hadn’t held back when they kissed goodnight, with his big arms folding her into the hard warmth of his chest. It felt like he wanted her to stay there for ever, and she’d be lying if she claimed she wasn’t tempted just to forget about it all and hop into the taxi beside him, there and then. But maybe he would have drawn the line at that. Something was all too obviously still eating away at him. And it was probably better to take things slowly this time, anyway. There was no way he didn’t want to get involved with her, she could sense that. They’d just have to be careful, in future, and avoid the work thing altogether.

  In future, maybe, but not just yet. Back upstairs she went straight to the terminal he’d been working on, which she’d pretended to turn off when he left, but had actually only put to sleep, making sure the hard drive stayed up and running. She touched the space bar and the screen flickered back into life. A few keystrokes later and she was able to call up the log, and then a list of the files he’d gone through in the archive. It didn’t take long to find the one she wanted. He’d stared at it for a good five minutes, not realising that from where she was sitting she’d been able to read the catchlines on just about everything he had looked at.

  She called up the story. It must have been one of the earliest on the database, from 1995, and it looked like something from a gossipy political diary. The sort of thing they published back in the day when the Herald took itself more seriously, and fancied itself a player in the power market rather than primarily a purveyor of scandal. It was a brief, snibby insert written under the name Oisin MacCumhaill, which she vaguely recalled was the pen-name of a once-renowned political columnist from years back. By the look of it, he’d been an insider writing for other insiders, trading in the sort of weaselly winks, nudges and innuendo that were incomprehensible to anyone who wasn’t already in on the joke, or who wasn’t in the know.

  GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN?

  We’re all saddened, I’m sure, to note the departure, from the ranks of the exalted, of the last of the Great Ones. But, while it might seem churlish to mention it now, there are those who will not mourn his passing. A heroic role in the formation of our great nation is all well and good. As is a lifetime devoted to the cause of justice, equality and fair hearing. But, occasionally, even heroes get it terribly, terribly wrong. So much so that great deeds in the past and even a lifetime’s devotion to Church and State cannot redress the balance. Most good folk who were in Gweedore in the August of 1988 will remember it as a place and a time of sunshine, beauty and joy. For a few, though, it will always remain a time of darkness, a high-water mark of hypocrisy, of the blackest of stains on a character regarded by many as the next best thing to sanctified. He, of all men, should have known that covering up evil for the sake of vanity, or family, in order to excise it from the public record, was nothing but a perversion of the justice he affected to hold so high.

  Siobhan stared at it, bemused. She read it and reread it, an
d tried to get her head round it. What the hell could Mulcahy have seen here that was so important? It yielded nothing at face value. Clearly it was written as a kind of riddle, to begin with – something the writer could only half say and hint at, for fear of being sued, presumably, or of some greater retribution. Damn Mulcahy, anyway: he was on to something, she could feel it so strongly. Still, if he could be, so could she.

  She scrolled back up to the top of the story. She knew for sure this was the one he’d stared at like he’d witnessed a revelation. The one he’d sneaked back to when she’d gone out to the loo, and been so absorbed in, he didn’t hear her coming back at first, then closed it hurriedly when he finally heard her behind him, making out it was nothing. ‘I was just trying to see if I could get to grips with some of those cuttings services you mentioned,’ he’d claimed.

  Yeah, right.

  So what was it? From the log, she could tell that for Mulcahy the keyword had to be Gweedore. That’s what he’d put in most of the searches. That and maybe a dozen other criteria: most frequently the word justice and the surname Rinn. All that had yielded him was a pile of references to some old judge who’d died years back, which he’d seemed vaguely interested in at first, but then he’d whipped though the files with barely enough time to read them. Towards the end, it looked like all he’d been doing was putting random-looking searches about crucifixes and torture and sexual assault into the mix – and getting nowhere with them, by the look of it.

  She scrolled back to the original story. The headline: GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN. It was obviously some sort of riddle, but a riddle meant for who? The writer had a grievance against somebody, but why and about what? And what was this ‘evil’ he was talking about?

  Keywords.

  She grabbed a pen and started writing down the words that seemed to stand out. Great Ones: a quick Google search led her precisely nowhere, the term being so vague it brought up references to everything from spiritualist nutcases to Brazilian footballers. She tried again with Gweedore and 1988 but, again, came back with nothing other than a pile of tourism junk and meaningless timelines. She was on the point of giving up when it occurred to her that, actually, it hadn’t been her who’d opened the web browser on Mulcahy’s terminal. She’d only booted up the Archive-search system on the monitor for him. She’d just assumed he would know how to launch the browser himself. And obviously he had, but when? That time she was out in the loo?